Surreal-Absurd

“The non-sequiturs of the word paintings in particular set us puzzles we can neither avoid, solve, nor entirely ignore. […] This is surreal in the way John Ashbery is - something appears to be consistent at the same time as engaging with it seems to establish that it is not.”

surreal-absurd

“I suspect my poems appear surreal, because there is significant overlap between the ways in which scientists and surrealists look at the world. Commonsense is backgrounded, in both, curiosity is foregrounded.“

Surreal-Absurd

“I can more or less remember when I first tried to be surrealistically creative: it was on a church youth club trip to London in around 1969 when I was 13. On the way home my mates and I were spectacularly bored on the rattling bus and I said, apropos of nothing, that when I got home I was going wash my hands in a bowl made from old leather cucumbers when I got home. That collision of leather and cucumbers got a laugh and a surreal door was opened in my mind.”

Surreal-Absurd

“Surrealism is just a way to cope with the extreme ordinariness and horror of daily life. If we don’t play, it’s like an acceptance of a world in which we eat and dress from a giant monotonous supermarket – we are at the mercy of the chains!”

Surreal-Absurd

“every night i lie in bed and lie and wait until my mind logs off … until my hardware powers down … i don’t know where i go at night or where i go during the day … i think this lack of knowledge is evident in my writing …”

Surreal-Absurd

“The surreal and the absurd are absolutely necessary. […] My work reflects my own thoughts and impressions about what makes people tick. Turns out I find comfort in the “not knowing”.”

Surreal-Absurd

“Inhale an image, exhale a word. Melt a book to paint a mirror. Buy nothing you can borrow. Refill a song. Place a window somewhere evident. Let muscle overcome memory. Is image a language never needing translation?”

Surreal-Absurd

“Through surrealism, I write connected to activism, connected to absurdity, and connected to art.”

Surreal-Absurd

“A central feature of Yi Won’s work is how she sees the world through images rather than meaning. "This feature makes me want to make my poetic language imagery newer and stranger," Yi Won says…"The irony of the closest thing being the most unfamiliar seems to provide an unfamiliar and familiar image at the same time.”

Surreal-Absurd

“My poems court the absurd in that they’re incongruous, at times silly, and frequently out of tune (from the Latin absurdus) – think The Residents’ Commercial Album, Heinrich Ignatz Franz von Biber’s scordatura tuning for the Rosary Sonatas, as well as The Shaggs…”

surreal-absurd

“My poetry is made from dream paste, shimmer artifice of momentary disturbance. I like that surrealism is about connection and rupture, copying, aporia. I always felt my soul was pretty alien.”

Surreal-Absurd

“Love is surreal, surreal is love” - to divert John Lennon’s line (big words! what’s love, what’s surreal?). These poems (what’s a poem?) emerged from an accident, the accident of opening a territory and the accident of venturing into this new intimate territory where two bodies touching and two subconscious minds clinking against each other is full of dangers and an endless surprise.

Surreal-Absurd

“In a sense maybe all poetry is absurd? Or at least, all poetry is artifice…”

Surreal-Absurd

“The Surreal has always been my refuge from a world in which I could once only recognize a system governed by pre-established rules, before I inevitably came to embrace the disorder, whirling in deluge, that lay alongside and underneath it.”

Surreal-Absurd

“I first met Babs when I first met Babs in London. … I went into a shop on the Bethnal Green Road, surrounded by people pretending to be poets, and met her basically. I thought I had seen it all, but here was this purple cat…”

Surreal-Absurd Sampler

“At some point, as if there was some kind of tipping point, there seemed to be enough surreal aspects to the supposedly real world, which made it simply a more honest way to try to reckon with said world. In terms of poetic practices, it was Francis Ponge and his delightful prose poems that held open the door for me.”

Surreal-Absurd

“When I found Surrealism, I was attracted by its extremism – but whilst automatism is invigorating it’s also exhausting. I’m glad to have found other surrealist methods enabling me to ‘manifest’ my writing using chance…”

Surreal-Absurd

“My interest in the surreal and absurd predates my interest in poetry. We almost all have dreams, I guess, but not everybody wants to hear about them. I have always wanted to hear about them, to have a poke around in someone's selfhood, beyond those pesky impositions like veracity and linear time.”

Surreal-Absurd

“If art partly functions by pulling us out of our common habits of perception, maybe it necessarily offers a foretaste of the way the real will transgress against itself in crime, catastrophe, and accident: poetry's untidiness seems to adumbrate the unvraveling of everything…”